The Girls Who Changed History and How What They Wore Played a Part

‘Who is more attuned to matters of self-presentation than teenage girls?’ asks Mattie Kahn, author of the new book, ‘Young and Restless.’

You all know I love to be up on my soapbox preaching about the power of fashion! But can you guess what’s even better? Talking with someone who truly gets it. Today I am delighted to bring you one such conversation, an affirming and thought-provoking chat with Mattie Kahn. A writer and editor, she is also the author of a new book (out today!) called, Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions.

Beginning with the mill girls of the 1800s through to Greta Thunberg’s campaign for climate change, Young and Restless tells the stories of activism and change brought on by girls — and yes, often what they wore was a big part of their efforts. As Garance Franke-Ruta wrote in her review in the New York Times, Kahn “brings a onetime women’s magazine editor’s attentiveness to the importance of style and theatricality in the lives of young women whose sashes and hats, hairstyles and armbands and, finally, pants, have marked their movements for change.” 

In her time at Elle and Glamour, Kahn covered major national news stories, including the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla. She saw movements begin and grow — and within them the work of girls, bringing a unique perspective and vision to their activism. Impressed by their drive, Kahn thought there was a bigger story to tell. “It took only two days of research to realize this is a tale as old as time,” she said. “Since the American revolution, girls have been on the vanguard of major social movements.”

Five years of work later (two spent on the proposal, another three on the book) Kahn has written Young and Restless, which she describes as “an alternative history of American progress as told through the girls who helped make it happen.”

Below you will find our conversation, which I enjoyed immensely. Kahn makes the most compelling case I’ve heard for the word “girl,” explains why visual presentation is uniquely important to this demographic as well as why speaking through fashion is fraught and so much more. 

You can read an excerpt of Young and Restless, called “If You Want to Be an Activist, Dress Like One,” over at Elle. Pick up a copy at your local independent bookstore, Bookshop.org, Amazon, or wherever you get your books.

📚 Enter to Win a Copy of Young and Restless

***Updated 6/16: GIVEAWAY NOW CLOSED — winners will be notified directly***

How is this for a giveaway! Mattie has TWENTY FIVE (25!) copies of her new book to send to readers of So Many Thoughts. So exciting! To enter to receive Young and Restless, please fill out this Google form. Recipients will be selected at random; books will only be shipped to U.S. addresses. Best of luck — and thank you, Mattie!

The Girls Who Changed History and How What They Wore Played a Part

Please note: Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start by how you selected the stories to tell in Young and Restless. You say in the introduction that this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide — that would take several volumes! How did you narrow it down?

Mattie Kahn: One of the things I wanted the book to demonstrate was not just: Here’s a list of amazing girls who have accomplished a lot. I wanted to show how girls use the skills that they are socialized to develop in girlhood to further their own activist priorities and their sense of political possibility. Each chapter has a heroine, or several, but I also tried to have each piece of the book focus on something that girls were uniquely bringing to their activism, including friendship and fashion.

I also had to contend with the realities of our historical record, which is overwhelmingly white and cisgender. You have to work with the material that the archives have and it’s humbling to think of all the stories that aren’t in this book because we don’t know them, because those stories haven’t been recorded. It’s completely devastating.

And also, the problems that these girls are dealing with in this book are so massive and so structural that it’s heartbreaking to think of all the people who couldn’t take those issues. You see girls throwing their heads against the wall, taking on workplace conditions, restrictive gender policies and inequities, discrimination and bigotry, all these things. And then you think of the girls who simply were subjected to that and didn’t have the power or the tools at their disposal to take that on. That also can be horribly arresting when you’re trying to tell a story of progress. You have to grapple with the fact that actually a lot of people suffered while that progress wasn’t being made. 

You describe these activists as girls and I must admit I was surprised by my own reaction to that word. Why is the term so charged? 

I’m the daughter of a second-wave feminist and she had such a strong reaction to that word, too. As a child of the ‘90s and the era of Girl Power, I just didn’t have those associations with the word as negative. 

The deeper I went into the project, the more I felt like we are going to reclaim this period of life that is so powerful and so formative. We’re going to elevate it and not treat it like it’s somehow dismissive or condescending to identify a group of people as girls. We’re going to celebrate what girlhood has to offer. 

I felt a responsibility to the girls who identified themselves as girls in this period, to not take that away from them because I feel like we should have a different term to refer to them. And it also felt important to me to be expansive in that term and include a lot of people in it who historically would not have been granted the rights and the privileges of childhood. I actually felt like we need to restore to this term some dignity and count in that group those people who never got the chance to be seen as children, whose innocence was denied.

It’s such a good point. As I was reading and reacting to the word ’girls,’ I wondered what I thought you should use. The first alternate term that came to mind is ’young women,’ which places them on the path to adulthood.

It instantly puts girls on the precipice of womanhood in a way that can be sexualizing and adultifying when in fact a lot of what the children and adolescents in this book are asking for is to have their humanity as children recognized and affirmed and their future safeguarded — which to me is like one of the most plaintive cries of childhood: Let me be safe to grow up.

I felt like it’s so important that we recognize childhood is a potent political force.  Because children can’t vote and they don’t have representation in the same way as adults, we sort of have this urge to say: If we’re going to take this group seriously, we need to make them a little bit older. No, we can appreciate them as this constituency that deserves a voice. And I felt like a lot of the girls and young women in the book kind of insisted on that. 

The first chapter of your book is about the Lowell mill girls of the 1830s. What made that time and those girls a good starting point?

I wanted to make sure, to your point, that the book started with a sense of purpose. I also wanted to get at the individual qualities of excellence that some of these girls possess, which made them amazing avatars for this cause, as well as the power of a collective mass of an amazing group of girls. Because I think that’s what a lot of grown men are afraid of, the idea of this huge group of overwhelming talking, chattering, gossiping, head-in-the-clouds group of girls. 

That’s very much how the mill girls were viewed, that they needed to be reigned in, they needed to be trained, they needed to be turned into beautiful American women who would be the mothers of this nation. I love the idea of girls getting up to their own devices away from their families for the first time.

For the folks who haven’t had a chance to read your book yet, tell us a brief history of the mill girls.

There were amazing looms and textile mills in England, where child labor was a constant and children were treated to absolutely brutal conditions. And I don’t want to make it seem like America came up with some amazing way of not brutalizing young people. There’s a lot in that chapter about the relationship to the cotton mills that were weaving textiles and the enslaved people that were producing the fabric that was woven there.

The people who innovated this process in America didn’t want to have children working in these brutal conditions, so they decided to recruit slightly older kids. There really was nothing for these girls to do at home on their family farms. The idea was to give them a place to earn some money, which was revolutionary for girls to have their own disposable income to spend as they pleased. And they did, on clothes and food and books. There was no precedent for that in the United States — or in most other places — for girls to be together earning money and have a sense of themselves as a collective group. 

Over the years, things were deteriorating at the mills. They weren’t getting paid what they felt they should and their costs of living were going up. They decided to band together. Decades before more formalized labor movements in the United States, these girls decided they were going to strike. 

It shook New England. The idea of girls with their own priorities and their own interests shocked people. I love that as a way to set the scene for the book. If you get enough girls together, they will talk about what displeases them and they will decide to do something about it.  And they’ll do it even as they obsess over the dresses they want to wear, which these girls did, and write in their diaries and talk about the people they want to marry and do all the things that we use to take girls not seriously. They’ll do all of that stuff and also plan a revolution. 

YES. I want to talk about the subjects we use to dismiss girls, as you say. This has been going on for hundreds of years. Why is that? 

When I was much later in the book project, I looked at the talking circles that laid the foundation for second-wave feminism. Women in these groups read the work of the Lowell mill girls and anthologized it in books about feminist writing. These women recognized that those girls were engaged in political work even as they were writing poems and sonnets and doodling as a way to pass the time. They saw the political value of that. Whether or not men recognize the value of this work, women across generations instantly see it for what it is, which is radical, political, passionate writing. And I found that tremendously heartening.

Can we drill down into the role of fashion in the criticism? 

One thing that has stayed with me — and I’m sure you know this quote — but when Vanessa Friedman left her job at the Financial Times as the fashion critic she wrote: “The world is not run by naked people.” All powerful people get dressed in the morning. Even if the decision says, “I never think about what I wear,” that, too, is a statement.

It comes back to the idea that every choice of self-presentation is deliberate. And in our world, who is more attuned to matters of self-presentation than teenage girls? They know better than anyone exactly their relative standing in a group in part because of what they wear and how they show up. 

And I never wanted to write a book like this and to imply: Oh, don’t worry, we’re not going talk about all that stuff that people think makes girls unserious. No, we’re going talk about that stuff and show that it’s actually completely intertwined with real political work and activist work and social progress. This is the way girls work and this is the way people work.

I appreciate how you point out just how complicated fashion, and making a statement with clothing, can be.

As you know, it’s fraught to try to use fashion and appearance to speak for you because it’s not as precise a language as actually being able to say what you want to say. I think you have to consider — and this is definitely true for royals before this generation and for many, many historical girls — talking wasn’t an option. Being heard in that way wasn’t an option. And so in the absence of having a megaphone, you’re going to have to figure out how your clothes can speak for you.

There is an example in the book that I found very powerful. In Texas, when a really brutal anti-immigration law came up for debate, a group of teenage girls wore their quinceañera dresses to the state capitol and protested on the steps. It was a really potent protest because it invoked the rituals of girlhood in such a profound and visible way.

At the same time, I remember feeling so heartbroken. First of all, because that bill passed. But also because one of the girls said in an interview that she was so uncomfortable wearing this dress protesting in the hot sun for hours. But she knew that nobody would’ve covered this protest if they showed up in jeans and t-shirts. 

I think that that is the dance that we all do. How can we use this thing that’s sometimes used against us to our advantage? And how can we grapple with the fact that it’s not a perfect tool?

I think all the time about our hyper-visual age, dominated by cable news and social media. It really helps to have powerful pictures to attract attention and a big part of what you see in pictures is what someone is wearing. But it’s not perfect.

I wish we lived in a world where it was enough just to speak your mind, but that’s not the case — and actually, I take that back. I don’t even know if I wish I lived in that world. It’s so powerful, when people are trying to dehumanize you, to show up as yourself and insist on being seen as a person with beautiful traditions and cultures that you’re going to celebrate.

My favorite chapter might have to be “Look At Me Now,” diving into what you call “the aesthetics of a movement.” And it’s not just fashion choices, but beauty rituals, too, particularly for Black girls.

There are two back-to-back examples of girls who protested at lunch counters to desegregate those spaces who were attacked physically, but also often attacked with food. They had ketchup thrown at them, cigarette butts put out on their clothes, all kinds of completely humiliating and degrading forms of personal attack that I think are particularly potent for women who know how important it is — and for Black women in particular who have been told — to look a certain way.  Those girls wore their absolute finest to those protests because that was the expectation. You had to look perfect.

Immediately after those protests ended or the police came, a lot of those girls went straight to the salon to get their hair redone. The protection offered by that space made me want to cry, for the generations of women who have turned to other women to groom them and make them feel whole and make them feel beautiful. Not for the outside world or for other people’s consumption, but for their own sense of self. 

That is also part of this book: Where do you go and who do you find who will put you back together? And beauty rituals and fashion are, to me, a really big part of that. I love those stories even though obviously they’re born out of tremendous pain.

Where would you say we are now? So many of the issues you cover in Young and Restless are still prevalent today in a painful way.

The activists in this book are asking — and sometimes begging — to be seen. We see that today in the anti-gun violence movement, in the climate change crisis, in the places where trans kids and trans girls are. That really is the demand: Let me be the person that I am. Let me have a future. Let me grow up.

One of the watchwords of the book is not to spend too much time congratulating girls on how excellent they’ve been for centuries and how much they’ve accomplished. The goal should be that people don’t have to do this, they don’t have to trade in the chip of their girlhood in order to be recognized as a human being. That is where I feel there’s a lot of work for adults to do — to create a world where this isn’t necessary.

Thank you, Mattie! You can find here on Instagram here and pick up a copy of Young and Restless at your local independent bookstore, Bookshop.org, Amazon, or wherever you get your books.

PS: Don’t forget to fill out this Google form to enter to win one of 25 copies Mattie is giving away to readers of So Many Thoughts! (Note: Recipients will be picked at random and this is open to U.S. addresses only.)